Mathematician Thinks There's a Way to Pick Your Lotto Numbers With a Greater Chance to Win

"... not merely a matter of luck ..."

Aside from the Hollywood portrayal of time travelers going to the future to pirate winning lottery numbers, picking the correct combination for a winning ticket is generally accepted to be a matter of luck. But a new study, arguing that not all combinations of numbers have the same probability, suggests there could be an art to predicting the winning numbers.

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Renato Gianella from Brazil used mathematics and probability theories to create a color template that he said can help people identify combinations of numbers with a greater likelihood to win.

"You will learn that winning a lottery is not merely a matter of luck: by having the right information you will be able to create game strategies. We will show you how to play in a very simple and easy way, based on the fact that drawings are subordinated to a behavior pattern," Gianella's LotoRainbow tool's website stated.

According to the article published in Biometric Brazilian Journal, the Power Ball lottery in the United States, for example, has 19 groups of different probabilities, as opposed to a single probability that applies to all possible combinations of numbers.

First, the LotoRainbow tool divides up numbers by colors.

Image source: LotoRainbow

Even if you pick very different numbers in two games, for example, it might have the same color template.

Though different numbers were chosen in this example, they have the same color template. (Image source: LotoRainbow)

From there, the tool describes different types of color template combinations.

Image source: LotoRainbow

Then, based on the game being played, a theoretical probability of a combination is given. The below example shows the probability (in decreasing order) of the PP combination in the Brazilian lottery game called Super Sena. It shows that there is a theoretical probability of 38.27 percent that a PP combination will be the winning numbers, meaning it would happen 38 out of every 100 drawings. This type of strategy could help players narrow down the combination of numbers they could pick that could result in a more likely win.

Image source: LotoRainbow

Describing these findings as the "Geometry of Chance," the study said that while "all bets are equally likely, behavior patterns obey different probabilities, which can make all the difference in the concept of games, benefitting gamblers that make use of the rational information."

With this information, Gianella said that the "lottery should no longer be seeing as a form of a gambling but a true representation of the probabilistic theory and the Law of Large Numbers."